KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urgently requested more military and defense support at a meeting with the leaders of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) in Latvia.
“Russian aggression can and must fail. And our task now is to speed it up. Now — at this summit — I urge you to do everything to speed up the defeat of the occupiers,” he said.
The U.K.-led force includes Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway; eight of the group are also members of NATO, with Finland and Sweden currently outside that alliance.
Earlier Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a rare visit to Minsk, extolling the benefits of cooperation with neighboring ally Belarus, stoking fears in Kyiv that plans for a joint ground offensive are in the works.
Ukrainian joint forces commander Serhiy Nayev said he believed Putin’s meeting with his Belarusian counterpart would address “further aggression against Ukraine and the broader involvement of the Belarusian armed forces in the operation against Ukraine, in particular, in our opinion, also on the ground.”
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has said repeatedly he has no intention of sending his country’s troops into Ukraine, after providing Russian troops with a launching pad for the invasion in February.
“Russia has no interest in absorbing anyone,” Putin said during the news conference. “There is simply no expediency in this. … It’s not a takeover, it’s a matter of policy alignment.”
Asked about this comment, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said it should be treated as the “height of irony,” given it was “coming from a leader who is seeking at the present moment, right now, to violently absorb his other peaceful next-door neighbor.”
(VOA)
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